More than half of biological pharmaceuticals are stored as freeze-dried powders. In an ongoing effort to understand why many biologics exhibit reduced therapeutic efficacy when they are rehydrated from freeze-dried powders, we have developed a novel computational technique to simulate water sorption on proteins.

The Link lab has used bioinformatic techniques to find a new class of lasso peptides in water-dwelling bacteria. A characteristic of the gene clusters that encode these lasso peptides is a gene encoding a lasso peptide isopeptidase, which recognizes the knotted structure of a lasso peptide and cleaves it into a linear peptide.

Catenanes are interlocked molecules in which constituents are held together by mechanical bonds rather than covalent bonds. A catenane with 3 interlocking rings (a [3]catenane) was built by enzymatically cleaving a variant of the lasso peptide microcin J25. The cleaved peptides self-assembled into the [3]catenane shown here, the structure of which was determined by NMR.

New permselective polymeric materials to enable the recovery and concentration of butanol from dilute aqueous solution, such as fermentation broth have been developed. Energy-efficient recovery of butanol is an essential enabling technology for the large-scale production of butanol as both a chemical building block, and eventually, biofuel.

A new technique uses nonlinear manifold learning to infer structural relationships between colloidal particles based on their local topology. This approach facilitates the identification of crystal structures during self-assembly, when they may be distorted, defective, or even unknown.

Changing from a linear to a star block copolymer architecture can yield substantial improvements in the properties of thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs), such as their tensile strength and recovery from deformation. TPEs are melt-processable, reprocessable and recyclable, but typically show incomplete recovery from deformation when compared with conventional vulcanized elastomers.

Electrochromic window technologies offer dynamic control of the optical transmission of the visible and near-IR portions of the solar spectrum to reduce lighting, heating and cooling needs. Solar cells harvesting near-UV photons could satisfy the unmet need of powering such smart windows without competing for visible or near-IR photons and without aesthetic and design constraints.

Drying colloidal mixtures can undergo a spontaneous, nonequilibrium vertical separation into layers enriched in particles of a specific size, an effect which can be exploited to create functional coatings. Using simulations, we showed how the size of these layers depends on the particle size ratio and the drying rate, and proposed a model based on dynamical density functional theory to explain the observed phenomena.

Mechanical deformations endured by flexible electronics can induce changes in the electrical resistance of their active electronic component. This effect is quantified by a parameter called the gauge factor. The tunability of both the polarity and the magnitude of the gauge factor of electrically conducting polyaniline can be achieved by structural manipulation.